The Oldest Profession

When people talk about the ‘oldest profession’, they usually mean prostitution. I think that's just misogyny—as if that's the only way an attractive woman can earn a living—the oldest profession is something entirely different.

In the earliest days of man, I'm fairly confident someone climbed a tree to get a better look at what the next tribe down the valley was doing. Friend or foe didn’t matter, the point was gathering information to "measure" who's doing better and remedy the situation if need be, a trait that I am sad to say is almost exclusive to the males of the species.

In other words … espionage is the oldest profession. After the end of the Second World War, the US and the UK distributed captured German Enigma machines to the other allied developing countries so that they could secure their communications. What they failed to mention, till some time in the early 70s, was that they had broken the Enigma cypher and would be able to listen into all those ‘friendly’ exchanges.

The story of the day is whether Russian operatives interfered with the US electoral process by hacking into the DNC's (Democratic National Convention) servers and releasing embarrassing emails about Secretary Clinton and her staff. Let's start with the obvious: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange are not credible sources of information on this subject. Neither politician has a vested interest in this story being confirmed and as for Assange, he's in no position to trace back the source of the materials published from his location in a room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he's been holed up for the past few years.

What we do know is that someone took embarrassing emails from DNC servers and that said emails then surfaced on Wikileaks. The result of this action has been an endless cycle of negative news stories that pecked away at Secretary Clinton’s numbers and played into the rhetoric coming from the opposing campaign. Now, if we discount an inside mole or a Watergate repeat, the focus shifts to foreign governments. President elect Trump has pretty much alienated everyone other than the Russians, they have the means and the attack exhibits all the traits of stereotypical "Soviet Bear" bravado. This is far from conclusive evidence, of course, but it's a pretty solid guess. The US doesn't send 36 diplomats packing simply as an act of meaningless posturing, and where there's smoke, there’s usually fire.

Back in the early Snowden days, the US was placed under a microscope when evidence of coordinated intelligence activity targeting their German allies, among others, came to light. Let's just set the record straight: EVERYONE collects intelligence on EVERYONE and if they don't have enough information, clandestine methods are deployed to remedy the matter. Righteous indignation aside, the Germans have always suspected if not known they were targets of US espionage activity. The US Intelligence apparatus has a budget in excess of $52 billion and you don't set up that kind of capability to track cave dwellers in Afghanistan. Ironically, that's more old fashioned human intelligence work than anything else and it also happens to be the least costly. 

If you hold information that is of value to someone else, they will try to get to it. How many resources they allocate to this task is a question of resolve and success in this endeavor is a question of having the right resources, know your adversary— note, I chose that term carefully, I didn't say enemy.

Note on the artwork, Mata Hari, was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy and executed by firing squad in France under charges of espionage for Germany during World War I